Dark Is My Favorite Netflix Series

Don’t be afraid of the subtitles

It’s been a long while since I sat around thinking about a television show, hankering for the next season to arrive and resolve the cliffhanger ending to the previous season.

And by “a long while,” I’m talking about the good old days of television, when a cliffhanger at the end of the third season of Dallas created the catchphrase, “Who shot JR?”

That turned out to be a whole thing. On November 21, 1980, 350 million people tuned in around the world to find out the answer to the question. (For comparison, Netflix is estimated to have 167 million global subscribers as of April 2020.)

I’m fairly certain that Dark, the German language Netflix series with the cool cliffhanger, does not have such a global following. Television is a whole different beast in 2020, and a cliffhanger doesn’t have the same gravity as in days of yore, with everyone standing around the water cooler at the office, deeply engaged in conversation on the morning after a new season starts.

People can watch at their leisure and catch up when time allows, which takes away from the magic in terms of collective experience. But good storytelling remains intact, regardless of when it is streamed or viewed.

I’m sure someone is tracking how many people watch each streamed show, but I was not able to come up with a real number for Dark after a simple internet search.

I did discover this much: Dark is “extremely popular with Reelgood users” this week. I have no idea how that translates into the number of viewers, but it’s safe to assume that I am not alone in my enthusiasm for this program.

How the world of TV has changed

As a kid, I was a big consumer of TV. Like most Americans, I grew up in a household where my family gathered around the TV each night before heading off to bed. One of us had to get up to change the channel, and sometimes I had to move the antenna around to get a clear picture.

We laughed together at the shenanigans of those whacky California roommates on Three’s Company and groaned at the silly antics of the Fonz and the Cunninghams on Happy Days. Once we were hooked on the characters, we watched the various spin-offs like Laverne and Shirley, Mork and Mindy, and even the short-lived show about the upstairs neighbors on Three’s Company called The Ropers.

The escape into the boob tube wasn’t all comedy and laughter. We cried together too, like when Mary Ingalls lost her sight on Little House on the Prairie, and when Grandpa died in the 7th season of The Waltons. These were cathartic moments that we shared as a family, and experiences that left me enamored of television.

Years later I worked in and around the television industry for the majority of the 1990s. I worked in the residuals department calculating out the payments to actors, writers, and directors for the reruns of TV shows. The system used to work like this:

A TV series received a green light after an initial episode was viewed as a test. This first show was known as the pilot episode and aired during pilot season. If a certain number of people liked that pilot, they filmed an entire season.

After the first batch of episodes aired in the fall, the show was renewed or canceled after the crunching of various numbers by the studio in charge of producing it. The shows were renewed in large part based on Nielsen ratings, which was a measure of how many people were tuning in on any given night.

Much like the data used by Realgood, which tracks the streaming behavior of some 4 million people subscribed to the service and then extrapolates the overall popularity of a program, the ratings collected by Nielsen were the key indicator of success. A sampling of households was polled using a physical Nielsen Box, and the viewing behavior of those people was thought to represent the viewing trends of the American people as a whole.

Once the cost of production was matched against the studio revenue from airing commercials, a decision was made to renew or cancel. If it was renewed enough times, the series could be syndicated and sold into repeated viewings. There was job security in calculating residuals, as people never seemed to get enough of watching old tv shows.

Fast forward to today, and the online streaming world continues to develop different mechanisms and has turned the traditional television industry on its ear. My main complaint is the fuzzy buffering effect that interrupts my picture these days. I used to be able to put tin foil on my rabbit ear antennae — now it seems to be beyond my control.

I am not clear how the programming decisions are made compared to when I worked at Sony in the 1990s. However they do it, Netflix has continually improved the quality of programming since launching original content in 2013.

I now work in a completely different sector, and hardly have time for watching TV. My wife and I cut the cable earlier this year. We spend so little time in front of the tube that the cost of cable was not paying off.

I only miss two or three things — Sunday Morning show, occasional sports (which are all on hold anyway), and maybe the cold open or the weekend update sketch from SNL. Otherwise, good riddance.

I do appreciate programming on Amazon Prime, like Bosch, and a few of the series on Showtime, which we stream.

The rest of our tube time is Netflix, which brings me back to Dark. I fully recommend it, but I wasn’t an immediate fan. I had to make three attempts to calibrate to the show. My first tip would be to change from the preset of watching the show dubbed, and choose to watch with subtitles. But however you consume it — don’t give up, even though you may want to. Dark grows on you, while also being a bit exhausting.

Just so you know, there are websites with plot charts, character tree diagrams (see Bustle or purefandom), and various theories about what it all means. And any show that earns that kind of attention from viewers will always get my respect. Each of these sites will obviously contain spoilers. I recommend to watch first, then use the above as a way to digest.

I’m fascinated by the themes and the temporal jumps in storytelling; I’m intrigued and befuddled as I try to keep tabs on the characters; I’m floored by the beauty and the artistic flair of how the whole thing looks on the screen and the innovative way they have chosen sound design. Kudos to the whole crew that was able to realize such a spectacular looking world, and to the cast for the moving portrayals.

So try it out! Give it a chance — or three chances. I’m super excited to view this final season, because the show stays with me, a bit haunting and definitely thought-provoking.

It’s a far cry from the easy distraction of watching The Love Boat with my mom and dad. But the times we live in are more complex, and Dark allows me a different kind of satisfaction — the opportunity to not just check out and mindlessly laugh at a simple comedy, but to lose myself in their Dark world, and concentrate on pretend problems for a while.